He began with some basic sketches and ideas focusing mainly on what the user experience would be. So my project originated as a super-fun, simple application for this research, to be enjoyed by all sorts of different people – not just engineers and developers.”Īs such, Dan was keen to keep things simple, fun, and whimsical, and he soon got down to work. “There are some great projects coming out of this research, but many of them are focused on neural networks themselves, rather than simple applications for these networks. “I got the idea while experimenting with some of the amazing open source research into neural networks,” Dan tells us. The result has been more than 50 million doodles, and Dan’s device seeks to match one of them with whatever the neural network reckons has just been snapped. The game is similar to Pictionary in that it suggests an object to sketch, with the twist being that it then uses AI to predict what you’re attempting to scribble. To do this, it makes use of two key components: a neural network and the dataset produced by Google’s online game Quick, Draw! (). This article first appeared in The MagPi 73 and was written by David Crookes

Instead of outputting a faithful photograph, it attempts to turn what it sees into a cartoon doodle, instantly spitting it out on to thermal paper like a quirky Polaroid picture.

With Dan Macnish’s camera, however, the process and results are a little different. You line up your shot, fiddle with the focus, set the shutter speed, and – flash! – you get a perfect image of whatever is in front of you.

Quickdraw withgoogle download